Johnson - Derrida and Science

Revue Internationale de Philosophie
DERRIDA AND SCIENCE

Author(s): Christopher JOHNSON
Source: Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 52, No. 205 (3), DERRIDA with his replies:
Contemporary philosophers / Philosophes contemporains (OCTOBRE 1998), pp. 477-493
Published by: Revue Internationale de Philosophie
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DERRIDA AND SCIENCE
Christopher JOHNSON
A significant feature of the phenomenon of structuralism, as it

developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s, was its appeal to contem
porary science. The loose confédération of disciplines designated as
the "sciences humaines", and at their centre, anthropology, were in
their différent ways claimed to be sciences of the human. The struc
tural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss itself claimed inspiration from the
then recent theoretical advances of a number of scientific disciplines
— biology, cybernetics, information theory — in addition to the
fundamental contribution of linguistics. However limited the sub
stance of such claims might appear in retrospect, at least one effect of
structuralism was to extend the field of interdisciplinary exchange
beyond the traditional circle of humanistic disciplines. The response
of philosophy to the structuralist phenomenon was by no means a
uniform one, and the celebrated "debate" between existentialism and
structuralism is but one aspect of the total picture. Whatever the
complications of this context (already, the status of philosophy within
the human sciences is an ambiguous one), Lévi-Strauss uses the
example of Sartre to stigmatize a certain kind of philosophy which
had failed to follow and think through the implications of modem
science (')·
The episode of structuralism is an essential préfacé to the question
of Derrida and science, of Derrida's relation to science, as it is in this
context that his first major works are published. While Derrida recog
nizes the important contribution of structuralism to a certain phase of
(1) See for instance Lévi-Strauss's remarks on Sartre in Didier Eribon, Conversations
with Claude Lévi-Strauss, translatée! by Paula Wissing (Chicago : University of Chicago
Press, 1991), pp. 118-19.
Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3/1998 - n° 205 - pp. 477-493.
478 CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
French thought, he is also strongly critical of it, questioning not only

its linguistic reductionism but more generally the discourse of the
human sciences, a discourse insufficiently cognizant of its roots in a
certain history of philosophy (2). Derrida's critique of Lévi-Strauss
and the scientistic claims of structuralism is not, however, équivalent
to a rejection of science itself, of (for example) a science that does
not think. There is clear evidence in Derrida's work of a consistent
interest in and attention to contemporary science, from his earliest to
his more recent texts. This is especially discernible in the texts con
cerned with the concept of writing. As Derrida notes in Of
Grammatology, there has been a conceptual transition, an epistemic
shift within the structural-linguistic paradigm, involving a change in
emphasis from the général idea of "language" to the more specific
notion of "writing". This new questioning concerning writing cornes
partly from within philosophy itself, but it is also part of a wider
scientific context with which philosophy has to reckon : "the contem
porary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the
most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And
finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered
by the cybernetic program would be the field of writing" (3). The
philosophical project which Derrida undertakes in Of Grammatology
and related texts therefore cannot be abstracted from the context of
what were at the time still recent developments in science.
Of course, the sciences Derrida is referring to here are not any of
the sciences. Biology and cybernetics occupy what might be termed
the "soft" end of the so-called "hard" sciences, and are of interest to
philosophy and the human sciences precisely because they touch more
immediately upon questions concerning the "human". The préoccupa
tion of cybernetics with information transfer and auto-mobile pro
cesses (communication and control) in animais, machines and humans
offers to philosophical reflection new ways of thinking the relation
ship between the animal and the human, the human and the techno
logical. The latter question, the question concerning technology, also
reminds us that Derrida's own thinking on writing is not only inspired
(2) "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", in Writing and
Différence, translated by Alan Bass (London : Routledge, 1978), pp. 284-5.
(3) Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and
London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 9.
DERRIDA AND SCIENCE 479
by scientific theory (it is precisely the traditional oppositions of

"theory" and "practice", of "pure" and "applied" science which are in
question here) but also, inseparably, by the practice of the new infor
mation and communication technologies developed in the post-war
period. According to Jean-Joseph Goux, among other historical
factors it is the presence of this new ambient technology which has
made possible the grammatological inquiry (4). Derrida's diagnosis of
a certain "end" of (logocentric) metaphysics, of which the grammato
logical turn is a symptom, could therefore be seen as part of the total
social fact of this quantitative as well as quantitative évolution of
Western technological culture.
However, the incidence of the cybernetic-informational paradigm in
Derrida's work should not be reduced simply to an enabling context, a
mere element of "inspiration" or "influence". It should be remem
bered that the critique of logocentrism undertaken in Of
Grammaîology and adjacent texts is not limited to a simple over
turning of the historical repression and réduction of writing in
Western philosophy, and that parallel to this first moment of decon
struction is the formulation of a général theory of writing which is in
many ways close to the cybernetic understanding of information in
complex systems. In a manner typical of Derrida's style of thinking,
this concept or theory or model of writing is not given any systematic
définition or explication, but rather emerges from a process of
dialogue with différent thinkers or "moments" of the Western philo
sophical tradition, a dialogue extending across a number of différent
texts. Despite this dispersai or dissémination of Derrida's thinking on
writing, one text in particular seems to condense a number of ideas
central to cybernetic and informational science. This is the important
essay on Freud published in 1967, "Freud and the Scene of
Writing" (5).
Derrida's stated intention in "The Scene of Writing" is to follow the
metaphor of writing as it is used in Freud's descriptions of the psychi
cal apparatus, from his earliest works onwards. While the Freudian
concepts of writing and trace are on the one hand limited by their
entrenchment in a given history of positivistic and metaphysical
(4) "Du graphème au chromosome", Les lettres françaises 1429 (29 March 1972), 7.
(5) Writing and Différence, pp. 196-231.
thought, on the other hand Derrida indicates Freud's critical and

careful handling of such concepts, the conscious nominalism of his
hypothetical constructions. Freud's use of the graphical metaphor is
therefore not simple, it is not reducible to the merely illustrative or
didactic use of the metaphor found in traditional philosophical
descriptions of the relationship between reason and experience, per
ception and memory. The first phase of Derrida's reading of Freud
concentrâtes not on the scriptural metaphor itself but on the memory
trace or, to use Freud's term, the facilitation (Bahnung). He shows
how Freud's model of the facilitation and of the psychical apparatus
radicalizes conventional empiricist and substantialist conceptions of
psychological processes such as perception and memory. First, he
questions the concept of facilitation as a present, empirical substance.
Though Freud wishes to retain the idea of facilitation as simple
quantity, opposing a transparent quality of consciousness to an opaque
quantity of memory, the concept itself is résistant to such réduction.
Rather, Freud's own spéculation on the process of memory shows it to
reside in the différences or relations between facilitations rather than
in their individual substance (6). Inséparable from this differential con
ception of the facilitation is its non-present and non-simultaneous
temporality. For Freud, one of the important functions of the network
of facilitations is to permit otherwise fatal quantities of excitation
extemal to the organism to be meted out and stored, that is, distributed
in Space. Equally important, however, is the distribution of excitations
in discrète répétitions, or periodic différences. Derrida assimilâtes this
notion of adjournment through distribution, of temporal as well as
spatial différence (interval and répétition), with his own concept of
différance (7). Finally, the facilitation is located in a system which
itself is not a simple and homogenous space. The psychical apparatus,
as Freud describes it, is a stratified system, a collection or consecution
of systems, instances or agencies. This complication or co-implication
of instances virtualizes psychical Space and makes it irreducible to
purely empirical observation or description. It could be said that with
such a complication of space, there is no determinable first or last
instance (8).
(6) Ibid., pp. 201, 204.

(7) Ibid., p. 202.
(8) Ibid., pp. 215-16.
Derrida's problematization of the substance, temporality and spatial

location of the memory trace in Freud, while owing something to
previous philosophies of différence (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), is
also clearly influenced by contemporary information science. His
construction, with and through Freud, of a dynamic model of the
psychical apparatus as a differential, discontinuous and complex
(stratified, multi-levelled) system is in many ways similar to the
models of cybernetic and information theory. This similarity is
pointed out by Wilden, who compares Derrida's reading of différence
in Freud with Bateson's conception of information as différence (9).
According to Bateson, what is important is not so much the quantities
of energy or substance supporting the transmission of information, as
the différences that the information represents. Wilden quotes
Buckley :
Though "information" is dépendent upon some physical base or
energy flow, the energy component is entirely subordinate to the
particular form or structure of variations that the physical base or flow
may manifest ... This structured variation — the marks of writing,
the sounds of speech, the molecular arrangement of the genetic code
of DNA, etc. — is still only raw material or energy unless it "corre
sponds" to, or matches in some important way, the structure of varia
tions of other components to which it may thereby become dynami
cally related (l0).
Bateson's own définition of information adds to this structural

description the temporal dimension of derferment, and again can be
compared with Derrida's notion of différance : "The technical term
'information' may be succinctly defined as any différence which
makes a différence in some later event. This définition is fundamental
for ail analysis of cybernetic systems and Organization" (")·
Derrida's reading of Freud, like Wilden's, therefore situâtes Freud
between two paradigms: the thermodynamic paradigm of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerned with forces, quan
tities and substances, and the informational paradigm of the present
(9) Anthony Wilden, System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1980), p. 398.
(10) Ibid., p. 138.
(11) Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books,
1972), p. 381.
period, which deals with différences, forms and relations. While many
critics of Freud point to the weakness of his bioenergetic and deter
ministic explanations of mental processes, Wilden and Derrida show
how this traditional substantialist-materialist perspective is in Freud's
text also coupled with a semiotic understanding of such processes.
Derrida's médiation of Freud in "The Scene of Writing" is not,
however, restricted to the aforementioned conceptual parallels with
modern science ; as was noted above, the theoretical advances in the
informational and cybernetic sciences in the post-war period are also,
irreducibly, technological advances. In Derrida's essay on Freud the
question of technology becomes increasingly central as he explores
how Freud's early neurological and anatomical descriptions of psychi
cal processes are superseded by spéculation of a more metaphorical
kind, more precisely by spéculation involving the use of scriptural
metaphors. This metaphor of writing becomes a working model when
it is combined with the machine in the example of the Mystic Writing
Päd. The Mystic Päd, with its ingenious laminated structure, is
superior to Freud's previous models in that it accounts for the dual
capacity of the psychical apparatus for both rétention and infinite
reception of Stimuli, the mental functions of perception and memory
which Freud believed to be mutually exclusive. It is easy to under
stand Derrida's interest in Freud's model. With its combination of
system and writing, machine and code, it is an infinitely more
sophisticated simulation of psychical processes than the traditional
metaphors of soul or psyché as inscribed wax tablet. As a complex
system of inscription it integrates the différent aspects of facilitation
and psychical apparatus explained above: ephemerality and discon
tinuity, stratification and non-simultaneity.
Typically, however, Derrida is not content to indicate the heuristic
advantages of Freud's model, and this is where he parts Company with
Freud. Freud's use of the analogy of the Mystic Päd is in the final
instance a purely instrumental one ; like the Lévi-Straussian bricoleur,
he adopts the model insofar as it is approximate to the object he
wishes to describe, but discards it when it no longer serves that
purpose. Freud concédés that the model of the Mystic Päd fails to
imitate the actual opération of human memory to the extent that it
does not possess the autonomy of the human psychical apparatus, that
is, it does not dispose of and use the capacity of cathexis. It is at
this point, as Freud articulâtes the limits of his analogy, that Derrida
questions this limitation. Despite the sophistication of Freud's model,

his final distinction between the living human psyché and the dead
technology of the Mystic Pad rejoins the traditional philosophical
conception of technology as external Supplement, an auxiliary but not
essential part of the human (I2). For his part, Derrida suggests that
Freud has not completely followed through the implications of his
own thought. The very possibility of the metaphorical passage
between psyché and model — their resemblance — would indicate a
more fundamental kind of relationship between the two. The very
possibility of the supplementation of consciousness, the very neces
sity of its externalization, would indicate a certain "death" at the heart
of this consciousness. As in a cybernetic circuit, the externalization
of the "human" would also be internalization of the "non-human", a
reciprocal process of affection and modification.
As can be seen, Derrida's dialogue with Freud is also a dialogue
with contemporary science, or more specifically the branch of modem
science concerned with complex systems. Whereas Freud follows
traditional closed-system scientific practice in his séparation of
psyché and world, the human and the technical, the essential and the
auxiliary, Derrida refuses such punctuation of context, and extends
Freud's internai stratification of instances into the external space of
the world: "The subject of writing is a system of relations between
strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyché, society, the world" (l3). This
systemic conception of the psyché is very close to Bateson's notion
of mind : "the mental world — the mind — the world of information
processing — is not limited by the skin" (14). It describes a system in
interaction with its context rather than the isolated entities and
processes of classical science. It is also part of a historical context in
which modem simulations of vital and human processes, infinitely
more sophisticated than Freud's humble artefact, are increasingly
calling into question the traditional line of démarcation between the
natural and the artificial (15).
The model of writing which emerges from Derrida's dialogue with
Freud in "The Scene of Writing" and texts contemporary to it can be
(12) Writing and Différence, p. 227.

(13) Ibid., p. 227.
(14) Steps to an Ecology ofMind, p. 454.
(15) Writing and Différence, p. 228.
seen as being constructed around a complex of terms: inscription,

différence, archi-writing, trace, deferment (différance). So far we have
examined its possible relations with one of the two sciences Derrida
mentions as being of special relevance to the grammatological
enquiry, cybernetics. The other science he mentions is biology. If
Derrida's conception of writing questions the conventional distinction
between the human and the technical, it also questions the traditional
définition of the human as "life", as the "living" — le vivant. As
biologist François Jacob points out, the discoveries of genetic science
in the 1950s and 1960s were very much dépendent on linguistic
models, more specifically on the metaphor of the genetic code as a
kind of script (16). For the most part, Derrida's engagement with
genetic science is not a direct one. Instead, it could be said that his
reflection on writing is extended into the realm of the biological by a
process of rhetorical accretion, perceptible at the level of what could
be termed his "bio-genetic" metaphors. The systematic use of such
metaphors is first apparent in Dissémination, and the complex of
associations built up in that text is extended and developed in a
number of subsequent texts, most notably Glas and The Post Card.
The conceptual matrix of writing-trace-difference-dij/férance, charac
teristic of Derrida's initial philosophy of inscription, is thus supple
mented by the bio-genetic figures of dissemination-germ(ination)
seminal différance. This Supplement is also an inflection : while in Of
Grammatology, for example, the concept of writing is already being
thought conjointly with the question of life, it is only with the élabora
tion of the later, bio-genetic lexicon that Derrida begins to explore in
an overtly rhetorical manner the questions of life and writing.
It is only possible here to reconstruct part of Derrida's dialogue —
his lateral dialogue — with genetic science. Again, this takes place in
the context of a continued interrogation of Western metaphysics, of its
représentation of life or the principle of life in the concept of the seed
or germ. This concept, Derrida tells us in Glas, is a key component of
Hegel's spéculative dialectic, figuratively linking the différent orders
he describes. The seed which anticipâtes (for example) the tree, and
which is also its end, is an ideal figuration of the reappropriating
return of mind to itself after its passage through nature or Expérience.
(16) "Le modèle linguistique en biologie", Critique 322 (March 1974), 195-205.
DERR1DA AND SCIENCE 485
Düring this circular journey, nothing is lost, all contradictions along

the way are resumed in the ascendent work of the Aufliebung. In its
Hegelian incarnation, the seed is therefore a closed monad, containing
and mirroring in their virtuality all subsequent contingencies in the
development of the system. This reappropriating return of seed to
seed, the satisfaction of the accomplishment of Absolute Mind is also
patri-linear, it is the self-inseminating spirit of God the Father, which
does not tolerate sexual différence (n).
Derrida's displacement or deconstruction of Hegel's représen
tation of the seed takes place firstly by a process of pluralization :
what he proposes is not the serene unfolding of a singular germ or
seed, but the plural scattering of dissémination, such as that described
in his discourse on flowers in the right-hand column of Glas. As he
had already asserted in Dissémination, where the concept is first
introduced: "There is no first insémination. The semen is already
swarming. The 'primai' insémination is dissémination" (18). In
Derrida's text, therefore, the germ, far from being the arche and the
eschaton of a given system, becomes the principle of dispersai and of
random combination. This movement of dissémination, or germina
tion, as it is sometimes called, has no predetermined pathway, its
telos is indeterminate ; in contrast with the ascent of the Hegelian
system towards the Absolute, dissémination descends, and descends
catastrophically. Unlike the stately return to the seifsame implied in
idealist teleology (a single line of descent, a maie economy),
Derridean dissémination is a continuous drift of différences which has
no origin and knows of no determinate future. The system is not
pulled into the future by a mysterious first (and last) principle, but is
pushed a tergo by what is handed down, selected and recombined,
from its ancestral past. This philosophy is, in essence, a philosophy of
évolution.
On the one hand, Derrida's elaborate juxtaposition in Glas of alter
native readings of the germ is clearly a Staging of two différent
traditions in Western metaphysics, materialism and idealism. His
privileging of the materialist tradition is visible in his inflection of the
(17) Glas, translated by John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 27-3la; 116a.
(18) Dissémination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 304.
word towards an "atomistic" interprétation, where the germ is not the

self-contained, self-reproducing entity of idealist philosophy, but a
fissiparous and proliferating particle which exists only in combination
with other particles, like the Lucretian atom. On the other hand, and
inséparable from this réactivation of atomist physics, Derrida's germ
is an interpellation of contemporary genetic science. This can be seen
in his insistence on the isomorphism between atom, term and germ,
which evokes the modern understanding of the molecular and infor
mational basis of heredity. This does not mean a static combination of
elements — atom, term or germ —, subject to a single code. In
Lucretius, the dynamic principle preceding combination and which
persists as a perturbing force within the constituted system is the
clinamen. Like Derrida's trace, the clinamen is not a thing or an
object, it is, properly speaking, nothing. More precisely, it is a move
ment, or an atom of movement (but not an atom), and is itself imper
ceptible. In Derridean terms, it might be described as pure spacing. As
the indeterminate principle of the code, it is itself not part of the code,
what Derrida refers to in Dissémination as the Supplement to the
code :
As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, séminal

[différance] does constitute itself into a program, but it is a program
that cannot be formalized. For reasons that can be formalized. The
infinity of its code, its rift, then, does not take a form saturated with
self-presence in the encyclopedic circle. It is attached, so to speak, to
the incessant falling of a Supplement to the code (>9).
In temporal terms, the code, as Derrida understands it, is therefore

constituted in process rather than in anticipation. Despite the sugges
tion of precedence implied in the articulation of the word "pro
gramme", the germ, the gram, the trace are never absolutely primary.
There is instead a kind of précipitation towards sense that is ignorant
of its future. All this is very close to the biological understanding of
the genetic code, which is metamorphic, constantly subject to the
destabilizing effects of mutation. The process of évolution (the context
of the code) is not an ascent of species towards some determinate
apex of development, but the selection after the event of mutations
most amenable to environmental constraints. By virtue of a feedback
(19) Ibid., p. 52.
process — both positive and negative — the genetic code is therefore

regulating (before) but also regulated (after) in the sense that its pro
gramme is executed in a context that is perpetually changing, hence
perpetually modifying the conditions of possibility of the code. The
Supplement to the code described above is this continuai differing
from-itself of the code as it descends the evolutionary slope. Of
course, the process of selection that operates a posteriori upon the
code's unprogrammed drift gives the appearance of the necessity of
the forms it produces. Like ail auto-mobile processes, it has some
thing of the uncanny about it, and is therefore, in the idealist inter
prétation, attributed to a transcendent (anthropologized) instance of
intentionality, that is, given a theological and teleological explanation.
According to a certain materialist tradition, on the other hand, the
unheimlich is quite heimisch, it is already quite at home within the
system.
Survival — biological survival — is dépendent on this double bind
of chance and necessity, that is, the conservatism of the genetic code,
the strict execution of its content (without which there would be
nothing) and the perturbation of its Supplement (without which there
would be no change). It would be a mistake, however, to interpret
Derrida's interpellation of genetic science as proposing an apriority of
the biological. His inflection of the seed metaphor, via the atomist
tradition, clearly does not essentialize life or vitalize phenomena.
Such essentializing is in fact more typical of the idealist and logo
centric tradition, which is predicated on the closed economy of what
is proper to the human, to life, to consciousness. The atomist tradition,
by contrast, necessarily sees a certain continuity between nature, the
human and culture. One important conséquence of the materialist
premise that atoms are not endowed with intelligence or life, is that
life itself is viewed as merely a property of organized matter. In their
turn, the many possible extensions of life — the technology of writing
for example — are similarly organized, that is, they depend upon a
syntax of combination. At the basis of "life", therefore, there is a
certain death, or non-being, continued into "life" through its exten
sions or articulations, and necessary to it.
When, therefore, Derrida aphoristically proposes that "each term is
indeed a germ, and each germ a term" (20), he is not simply proposing
(20) Ibid., p. 304.
an appropriate, but ultimately arbitrary, metaphor. The metaphor of

writing, as it is articulated with the genetic and the biological in
Derrida's texts, is not simply metaphor. One could attempt here to
employ a more discriminating vocabulary, to speak of isomorphism
rather than metaphor. But even this is not a sufficient approximation
to what Derrida is arguing, it merely displaces the problem, which is
that the similarity of form (isomorphism) of writing and genetic code
is indicative of their identity. Quite literally, the term is a germ and the
germ is a term. Viewed from within the context of évolution, which is
a continuum, they are the same thing. Functionally, there is a genetic
or genealogical continuity between the two, an unbroken line of
descent from the one to the other. Of course, formulated in this way,
this genealogy would appear to be self-evident, but as Derrida's analy
ses of speech and writing show, the logocentric tradition has consis
tently denied and repressed such a continuity, drawing a limit to the
"human" at the frontier of speech, as if speech were not also a (com
munication) technology. As is demonstrated in the impressive reason
ing of Of Grammatology and other texts of the same period, speech is
simply an instance of the generalized writing that is the structure of
ail systems. This général writing, like writing in the common sense of
the word or, more precisely, of which writing is an extension, is the
condition of possibility of the transmission of information (communi
cation) within and between ail complex systems. Without the trace,
the consigning of information to a memory or archive, there is no
communication (2!). The genetic code which ensures the invariant
reproduction of species is just an example (though for "life" and the
"human", the most important example) of such a writing.
It follows that Derrida's articulation of the biological and the
textual ("the term is a germ") does not simply place writing proper in
the wider, enveloping context of the genetic, but in turn présents the
genetic as a subset or special case of the more abstract category of the
trace. So the above formulation could be rephrased more clearly as
"the term (scriptural) is a germ (genetic) is a term (trace)", which
expresses an ascending order of generality. If the continuity of species
taught by Darwinian science in the nineteenth Century prompted
many to ask, what is man ?, the findings of genetics, cybernetics and
(21) See Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 374, 446.
information theory in this Century inevitably lead to Schrödinger's

question, what is life ?
This displacement of the bio-genetic is particularly well illustrated
in Derrida's reading of Benjamin's reflections on translation. In The
Task of the Translator Benjamin uses a sériés of familial, genealogical
and genetic metaphors to describe the process of translation from
one language to another, metaphors which are neither arbitrary nor
innocent. The theory behind Benjamin's metaphorical corrélation of
the textual and the genetic, according to Derrida, is not simply that we
as living beings produce texts, use them, translate the vital into
the textual, but that the translation of a text in général is a more
fundamental process than life itself. Derrida insists therefore that
Benjamin's use of the metaphor of the maturation of a seed, when dis
cussing the difficulties of translating Mallarmé (again, it is a question
of the seed), is not vitalistic :
The allusion to the maturation of a seed could resemble a vitalist or
geneticist metaphor ; it would corne, then, in support of the genealogi
cal and parental code which seems to dominate this text. In fact it
seems necessary here to invert this order and recognize what I have
elsewhere proposed to call the "metaphoric catastrophe" : far from
knowing first what "life" or "family" mean whenever we use these
familiar values to talk about language and translation, it is rather
starting from the notion of a language and its "sur-vival" in trans
lation that we could have access to the notion of what life and family
mean (22).
This "metaphoric catastrophe", first referred to in The Post

Card (23), is a restatement of the structure of inversion described
above: not only is the term a germ, but the germ is, in the most
général sense, a term. The continuous chain that extends from writing
(technology) to the biological to évolution is a subset of the more
général category of the trace. One arrives therefore at a non-biological
theory of évolution in which the testamentary structure of survival (in
(22) "Des Tours de Babel", translated by Joseph F. Graham, in Différence in

Translation, edited by Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London : Cornell University Press,
1985), p. 178.
(23) The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass
(Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 46.
the délégation and translation of the trace), the supplementary Über

leben over and above (before and after) the economy of life, is the
organizing principle.
Derrida's commentary on Benjamin shows quite clearly that this
metaphorical inversion, which is more than simply metaphorical, is
consciously articulated in Benjamin's text : the fact that mind, history,
art have a "life" of their own, survive over and above their biological
support, leads us to think natural life in terms of the wider life that is
history, and not vice versa (24). At the same time, Derrida extends this
argument and pushes it to its logical limit, by proposing that it is
the structure of translation, the structure of survival which is funda
mental : "In this sense the surviving dimension is an a priori — and
death would not change it at all" (25). Derrida is thus proposing, via
Benjamin, a form of pure translation that is logically prior to the
"original", a survival that is prior to "life".
If survival for any system is délégation in the trace, the consigning
to a "memory" whose principles are more général than human or even
biological (genetic) memory, this memory, which is the "history" of
the system (or more exactly, its future, its future anterior), is therefore
not a static script. In an "evolutionary" situation, reproduction is never
reproduction of the same, which is ultimately counter-adaptive.
Delegation is also translation. The Überleben is the supplementary
Übersetzen described in Derrida's reading of Benjamin which dis
places or transplants what it translates. Survival is only ensured by
the altération (translation) of the original, the differing from itself of
the code (the Supplement to the code), the perpetual rewriting of its
history. If one follows the logic of Derrida's rhetorical play on
the word "trace", then the anagram of trace/écart proposed in
Dissémination gives a usefully Condensed définition of this double
bound structure: the trace is both reste and restance, deposit and
movement. Within this structure, the écart of the trace is more funda
mental than its remainder, since it is only through such spacing that
new structures and new possibilities are produced.
Derrida's insistence on the primacy of the écart within the trace (of
survival over life, of translation over text) bears a striking resem
blance to current scientific thinking on life processes. Whereas biolo
(24) "Des Tours de Babel", pp. 178-9.

(25) Ibid., p. 182.
gists have traditionally taken reproduction to be the defining feature of

living systems, the category of fluctuation is now considered to be
logically prior to that of reproduction. The biologist Henri Atlan, for
example, takes issue with François Jacob's suggestion that the
"dream" of the cell is to become two cells, arguing instead for the
logical primacy of perturbation, of the departure from equilibrium
{écart d'équilibre) over reproduction in biology (26). This notion of
perturbation is a common feature of what in systems theory are
termed "ultrastable" or "multistable" systems, that is, systems having
a number of possible stable states, made possible by the "looseness"
or indeterminacy of their connections. Such systems are "equifinal" to
the extent that while their ostensible aim is reproduction, there are a
number of ways of achieving this aim. This potential for alternative
pathways of development can, by a process of feedback with a
changing environment, actually change the structure or programme of
the system. Because the code changes while attempting to remain the
same, reproduction will tend in each instance to be the replication of
the same but différent. Hence similar initial conditions may lead to
dissimilar end-states. This process of divergence, or "multifinality", is
not amenable to deterministic or even Statistical calculation, its direc
tion is not predictable in the same way that the development of a less
complex (closed) system is predictable. Evolution is one example of a
multifinal process.
As can be seen, there are a number of significant correspondences
between Derrida's philosophy of writing and the concepts of systems
theory. The systems concepts of ultrastability, equifinality and multi
finality might be usefully compared with the key notions of play and
dissémination in Derrida's work. His extended spéculation on the
figure of the letter in The Post Card, for example, combines ail of
these motifs — scriptural, communicational, systemic and biological
— in its questioning of the concept of a rigid law of destination. It is
precisely the play of destination (the possibility of perturbation, noise,
random fluctuation) which makes the system work, whereas perfect
transmission, perfect reproduction, would signify literally the death
of the system, paralysing its potential for change. To paraphrase
(26) Henri Atlan, L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information (Paris:

Hermann, 1972), p. 224.
Derrida's remark, quoted earlier: the law (of destination) cannot be

formalized for reasons that can be formalized. Or put another way, the
law of destination is a law of destabilization, as Derrida argues in My
Chances :
Language, however, is only one among those systems of marks that

claim this curious tendency as their property : they simultaneously
incline towards increasing the reserves of random indétermination as
well as the capacity for coding and overcoding or, in other words, for
control and self-regulation. Such compétition between randomness
and code disrupts the very systematicity of the system while it also,
however, regulates the restless, unstable interplay of the system.
Whatever its singularity in this respect, the linguistic system of these
traces or marks would merely be, it seems to me, just a particular
example of the law of destabilization (27).
Again, language, as a form of writing, as a system of marks, is for

Derrida only an example of the class of complex, ultrastable systems
which combine chance and necessity, coding and redundancy. It is in
passages such as this that one can see the extent to which Derrida's
thinking on system and writing has, over the years, developed in
interaction with some of the more interesting aspects of modern scien
tific thought. If, as we have seen, his earlier thinking on writing and
trace recognizes the importance of developments in cybernetics and
biology, his later work seems increasingly to gesture towards their
generalization in the concepts of systems theory.
The preceding analysis has attempted to show some of the ways in
which Derrida's work reflects or mediates aspects of contemporary
science. It deals of course with only one dimension of his work, but it
does show a thinker open to the implications of science, of what
science gives us to think. At the same time, as a philosopher,
Derrida's relation to what I have perhaps too unproblematically
referred to as "science" is more complex. If the body of knowledge
known as "systems theory", for example, rejects the closed-system
epistemology of traditional science in favour of an ecology of impli
cated systems, it could be argued that in its discursive practice and
(27) "My Chances/Mes Chances : A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies",

translated by Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances : Derrida, Psychoanalysis
and Literature, edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore and London :
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 2-3.
with respect to the phenomena it treats, it is still — necessarily —

restricted to the subject-object dichotomies of traditional science. In a
sense, for scientific discourse, this is the final frontier which cannot be
crossed, only probed. In a number of his texts, however, Derrida
initiâtes a step beyond this frontier by taking the notion of the open
system to its logical limit, including his own discourse as an example,
and more than an example, of the systems he describes. This kind of
self-reference is arguably only possible from a position outside of
science. It represents the critical mission of a philosophy which
questions conventional framings of systems and punctuations of
context, asking questions which science itself finally cannot ask if it is
to function without aporia as science.
University ofKeele, UK

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Revue Internationale de Philosophie

DERRIDA AND SCIENCE

A significant feature of the phenomenon of structuralism, as it

Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3/1998 - n° 205 - pp. 477-493.

French thought, he is also strongly critical of it, questioning not only

by scientific theory (it is precisely the traditional oppositions of

thought, on the other hand Derrida indicates Freud's critical and

(6) Ibid., pp. 201, 204.

Derrida's problematization of the substance, temporality and spatial

Bateson's own définition of information adds to this structural

questions this limitation. Despite the sophistication of Freud's model,

(12) Writing and Différence, p. 227.

seen as being constructed around a complex of terms: inscription,

Düring this circular journey, nothing is lost, all contradictions along

word towards an "atomistic" interprétation, where the germ is not the

As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, séminal

In temporal terms, the code, as Derrida understands it, is therefore

(19) Ibid., p. 52.

process — both positive and negative — the genetic code is therefore

(20) Ibid., p. 304.

an appropriate, but ultimately arbitrary, metaphor. The metaphor of

(21) See Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 374, 446.

information theory in this Century inevitably lead to Schrödinger's

This "metaphoric catastrophe", first referred to in The Post

(22) "Des Tours de Babel", translated by Joseph F. Graham, in Différence in

the délégation and translation of the trace), the supplementary Über

(24) "Des Tours de Babel", pp. 178-9.

gists have traditionally taken reproduction to be the defining feature of

(26) Henri Atlan, L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information (Paris:

Derrida's remark, quoted earlier: the law (of destination) cannot be

Language, however, is only one among those systems of marks that

Again, language, as a form of writing, as a system of marks, is for

(27) "My Chances/Mes Chances : A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies",

with respect to the phenomena it treats, it is still — necessarily —

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